Internal Debate

[Dreamthiev]

Hey all, looking for a bit of advice...

I'm currently writing a story in the 3rd person limited perspective. I've been inserted the occassionaly direct character thought into the story with use of italics. I've just come to a part of the story though where the character is basically having an argument with herself, inside her own head.

She's mostly asking rhetorical questions of herself, but then she's also providing answers to them. A 'voice in the back of your head' kind of thing. Something along the lines of:

Why am I doing this? Because I like it.

But longer/more involed.

My question is, what's the best way to handle this and make it easily readable and understanable? Should I just follow the question with the answer, like above? Or should I give the answer a seperate line like it was regular dialogue? Or is there some other way I should handle it?

Any suggestions/advice welcome

 

[snoopercharmbrights]

... My question is, what's the best way to handle this and make it easily readable and understanable? Should I just follow the question with the answer, like above?

In a word, "Yes." The only alternative is to put all direct speech in double quotes, direct thought in single quotes, and then the self-answers could be in italics.

 

[CopyCarver]

This reminds me of the old Nelson Algren anecdote. He was writing about a character who had some sort of dissociative identity disorder. The question was how to format and punctuate the arguments raging inside the character’s mind. “In the end,” Algren later said, “I decided the best way to punctuate schizophrenia is to do it as psychotically as possible.”

Seriously, there is no right way to handle the interior monologue you are describing. The trick is to do it in the manner that is least wrong, and as clear to the reader as possible. Snooper’s suggestion is as good as any extant, and far better than most of the alternatives.

 

[sr71plt]

Of course there are "right" ways of handling interior discourse (at least in the American system.) According to the Chicago Manual of Style 11.47, you can handle it as you show in your posting or enclose the interior discourse in double quotes:

"Thought, imagined dialogue, and other interior discourse may be enclosed in quotation marks or not, according to the context or the writer's preference."

Examples given:

"I don't care if we have offended Morgenstern," thought Vera. "Besides," she told herself, "they're all fools."

Why, we wondered, did we choose this route?

If what you've written has become so complex that you have dialogue within dialogue and want to use quotes, in the American system, the interior dialogue would be in single quotes.

 

[Dreamthiev]

Thanks all for the advice, it's a big help.